Category Archives: General

21.06.2006 Encrypting the Laptop for GUADEC

Traveling with a laptop to a foreign country, waiting at airports, driving in cabs, etc. puts your data at certain risks, considering the number of laptop losses at public places. Now, most of the documents and code on my system is free software or not particularly private anyway, but unfortunately not all. Some work [...]

18.04.2006 Fighting the build tools

A few months ago, i migrated the beast CVS module to automake-1.9. I’ve been working on fixing the various issues this change involved ever since… At this point, I’m stuck in the end phase of getting make distcheck to work, and ran into a rather unpleasant issue:
make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/src/beast/beast-0.7.0/_build/po’
INTLTOOL_EXTRACT=../intltool-extract srcdir=../../po ../intltool-update [...]

05.04.2006 Console Groups

While i was reading up on the Anti-Grain Geometry project discussion of AGG vs. Cairo, i came across this link: The State of Linux Graphics. This paper was apparently in the news last September, but somehow i managed to miss it. I’d say it’s a must read for anyone seriously involved with Linux [...]

14.12.2005 Never reject a feature!

I didn’t mean to engage in the flamage about the printer dialog or usability design issues with Gtk+’s new file chooser, but i do feel that a few things should be pointed out in this context nonetheless. In particular, I’d like to respond to Dave Neary (bolsh), quote: “Linus is irrelevant”. There’s an important [...]

08.11.2005 Trust Me! Sorry, No.

Often i have heard “Just trust me on this!” or similar requests during a technical discussion, and even though I would prefer to please the other person, i simply must say “No” to this kind of request, in bugzilla, on mailing lists, on IRC or even face-to-face discussions. “Trust Me” simply is not [...]

01.11.2005 My brand new toy

A few days ago, stefan demoed x2x to me, and i’ve fallen in love with it since. If you’re not regularly working with multiple machines (like a desktop and a laptop next to it) it probably won’t be of much use, but if you do, this little program allowes you to forward mouse and [...]

08.08.2005

scsi0: ERROR on channel 0, id 12, lun 0, CDB: Read (10) 00 03 8d 14 70 00 00 08 00
Current sda: sense key Medium Error
Additional sense: Unrecovered read error
It’s “Bye, bye hard disk, thanks for doing a great job!”-time again. The main disk of my development machine (IBM Ultrastar, Nov 2000) died [...]

17.07.2005

Been busy the last few days with creating a povray-rendered movie as part of a university project. Rendering can be very time consuming depending on the scene, so the resulting movie really is short, close to 2 minutes 30. Allthough we employed various measures to reduce rendering time, like creating a camera effect that only [...]

06.07.2005

Thanks to everyone who submitted hackergotchi mockups of my original image! Here is the resulting rambogotchi, you can stop contributing now ;)

05.07.2005

Help! I need artistic help, my problem is: i’m faceless! At least as far as the planet is concerned… Here is head shot of me which needs some editing to remove the background and add a drop shadow effect, in order to be accepted as a proper hackergotchi by jdub. If anyone is [...]

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